The Cards
Imagine you're signing up for a game that you are hyped about, possibly a game that was advertised as the best game of the year. You know they have interesting roles to play, and you are hoping you'd get your favorite role to make your mark in that game, or you just want to experience a role for the first time and this might be the game you'll be able to do that.
But then...
When the host assigns a private channel for you and adds you to it, you find out that you got the least role you wanted, or no role at all, just the power of your vote. This has happened to all of us who play social deduction games like Werewolves, Town of Salem, Among Us or Mafia; we always get the role we didn't want most of the time.
Players who like taking justice (or revenge) on their own hands end up getting a role to save people from death, people who like supporting roles get manipulation roles, and people who like simplicity in their role actions get instead, overcomplicated ones that they will never understand to play it effectively.
And so their game experience is ruined before it even began.
As trivial as these scenarios may seem to the most adapting players, these scenarios do happen and drive away players.
In Deck Mafia, you will never have that problem, because simply put, you decide what actions you will be playing before the game even starts.
That is because instead of a game moderator (or game host) randomizing and distributing roles to players before it begins, players select their actions in the forms of cards from their inventory to play and yes! It is possible that more than one player submit the same card, and the host must allow it (barring some unique exceptions).
That is the beauty of Deck Mafia, that a player instead of waiting for some good luck to get a role they want in a game, they choose what cards they will be playing in our game!
Our cards are 1-use actions that they can play during a phase (day or night), some are public, most are secret (unless you claim it) but they are all different! Yes! It is exactly what you are thinking! In Deck Mafia you are not stuck being a cop or a doctor, in Deck Mafia you can have up to 7 cards that allow you to be a doctor with one, a cop with another one, a traffic controller with the next one and so on for the rest of your deck. So not only you are submitting a power that you really want, you are submitting several.
That level of personalization is a key feature that you will not find in any other social deduction game besides Deck Mafia.
6 Scum Factions
In most social deduction games like Mafia, for example, you know the evil faction that you will be playing against if you rand town. Most likely it is just the Mafia party, or the Coven in Town of Salem, or the Impostors in Among Us. Such simplicity works for them, but it can get rather monotonous after a big while.
In Deck Mafia, we got 6 different evil factions that could possibly be in a game. We got the Scarlet Sirens, a faction whose factional kill is unblockable, unstoppable, undetectable and reveals no info in the results so as long as the characters that possess each trait is alive. When a character dies, their power that enhances the factional kill dies with them as well.
We got the Shamans faction, this one has a standard factional kill, not powerful as the Scarlet Sirens, but they can reanimate dead bodies and use their cards as their own.
We got the Madmen faction, a strict 3-players group scum (or two in games with less than 13 players) faction that win when they have obliterated all other factions. Unlike the other scum factions, they don't have a group chat at all, but each of them have conditional kills that they can perform.
Then there are the Plunderers, these vile thieves have a sweet tooth for your cards, they start with a few, but they can quickly cripple you as the game progresses, this is of course on top of a factional kill, and if you are thinking that you could just claim the cards they stole from you so if they use them, they risk revealing themselves, you are very wrong, because they can trade it out for different ones by contacting the host.
The Shapeshifters is the fifth one, these extraterrestrial villains in Deck Mafia's lore appear as members of the innocent party when they die, they don't have a direct factional kill, but they can poison up to three people, two of which are fake poisons so good luck healing the real one to save their innocent victim!
And last but not least, the Parasites faction. When a member of this party invades you, you will carry out all their card actions for them! If they target someone with a kill card, it is not them whom the tracker will see when the target is killed, it is you who they will see.
The scum factions are not disclosed in the signups period, so you will not know what to expect until the game begins when the host announces it.
The Third Parties
Also known as independent or neutrals in other games, most of our third parties are custom-made for Deck Mafia. For a detailed list and overview of each of them, please visit our home page here.
We got a total of 35 of them, such as the ASMR Artist (Survivor), Terror Diva (Jester), The DJ (Survivor), Navy SEALs (Cult) and Banana Man (Killer) just to name a few. Aha! Not the names you expected, right? ;)
The reality is that soloing a game has become a stronger preference throughout the short three years of Deck Mafia's existence as they offer new ways to approach, plan for and play the game; plus the incentive that third party winners get a slightly bigger reward than the innocent and scum factions. Rest assure, that playing as a third party is no walk in the park in Deck Mafia, it is as challenging as it is both rewarding and satisfying.
Our "Bastard" Approach
"Bastard" refers to very unorthodox and misleading mechanics, it also refers to the fact that anything can happen in our game. Things that you don't think are possible in standard social deduction games are possible here.
For example, you could die as an innocent party and resurrect as an evil one, or you could shoot a living player straight from the graveyard, or a member of the scum party could play a card that confirms it as scum in the game publicly and become unkillable until the rest of their teammates die first. You could get post restricted and be forced to post only GIFs, you could get a gun that is actually another player waiting for you to shoot so he could redirect that kill to someone else and frame you, or you could play a card that forces the host himself to troll a target for the remaining of the day phase. You could get water thrown at you and next night you get a cold, and believe me, getting a cold is bad news in Deck Mafia.
These are just a few of the many things that could happen in a game, no game is ever the same as the one before it, and that is the ultimate recipe to defeat boredom in our community. Some of you will laugh, some of you will get annoyed and step out for several hours until you cool down, it's a soup of emotions and experiences that likely you will never experience in another game, that is how we roll in Deck Mafia.
Conclusion
Social deduction games are still very niche in the world of online gaming, they are more popular as tabletop games, but you will still find a lot of them if you really try looking for them, when you do, you will realize that most social deduction game communities, either on forums or chat clients like Discord are very similar in how they are played. Deck Mafia is a like a valuable precious stone that you will find in an abandoned garage by the garage squad, we are very rare and very small still, and we are looking to change the latter, come join us and experience a social deduction game like no other in the online hemisphere.
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